Review of Chasing Wrongs and Rights by Elaine Pearson (original) (raw)
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What are human rights, and for whom do they work? How do actors across different contexts engage with, and sometimes restructure, the meanings and consequences of human rights law? Does this alter the lived experiences of people in different parts of the world? How, and to what extent, can a predominantly Western framework of human rights law deliver justice for those typically excluded from Western institutions? For peace scholars, advocates, and activists, the promise of international human rights law has not been met. While significant victories must not be understated, rarely has international law been translated into real protections for people living in different kinds of violence, trauma, and precarity. However, the cultural, political, and legal limitations of human rights law are not insurmountable; these challenges add importance to the groundwork done by community organizers and activists, advocates and allies, journalists who draw public attention to human rights defenders, and even social or natural scientists (whose credibility, research, documentation, and testimony can further bridge the gaps between the everyday realities of the peoples and ecosystems under threat, and the rigid structures and limited power of the laws meant to protect them). This class explores these problems, questions, and challenges by crossing several thresholds: between the fields of legal studies, global politics, and anthropology; between the study of institutions and of the humans who construct and are shaped by them; and between the cases for environmental sustainability, human rights, and peace. We will center our attention on how human rights are contested by people in different spheres, including states, corporations, NGOs, social movements, and civil society. Human rights are constantly being claimed, developed, and remade, by multiple actors. How does this matter in everyday life? We will seek to understand these dynamics from the perspectives of people working on and affected by this contestation. In questioning the efficacy of human rights as institutions, discourses, and embodied politics, and exploring illustrative answers, we will cross another threshold: between an advocacy perspective and a critical eye towards the ethnocentricity and biases in so-called " universal " mechanisms of justice. We will thus emerge better equipped to engage with and participate in struggles for decolonization and justice.
Reframing Human Rights in a Turbulent Era
2021
In a turbulent era, with illiberal nationalism on the rise and international laws and institutions under persistent threat, this book asks what future the international human rights system has. It rejects the claims of those who view human rights law and advocacy as ineffective or worse in challenging injustice. Instead, it presents an experimentalist account of human rights which emphasizes the ongoing engagement between domestic activists and international and domestic institutions and actors in promoting rights-based change. Rather than the monolithic movement depicted in some academic critiques, it discerns a rich and diverse human rights movement which has helped significantly to challenge injustice and advance progressive change in many contexts. Drawing on case studies of gender justice, disability rights, children’s rights and reproductive justice from Pakistan, Argentina and Ireland, the book argues that the human rights movement has made an important difference around the ...
Book Review Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21 st Century
Contexto Internacional, 2018
Sikkink defends that human rights international law, institutions, and movements are – not without temporary struggle and failures – legitimate and relatively effective in the long term. Therefore, in Evidence for Hope, Sikkink, supported by decades of research and fieldwork, counters the scepticism on international human rights norms, movements and institutions. Presenting evidence for hope without complacency, Sikkink demonstrates to readers and to unmotivated activists that the international and transnational human rights movement really matters. The book is a sophisticated reply to the critics indeed. Let’s wait for their replies now. And possibly some of them will flourish in the solid and necessary way tracked by Moyn’s latest book: pointing out the weakness and the historical marginalized position occupied by the concern with material inequalities in the international human rights law, institutions and movements.
Human Rights, Peace & Justice-Akarsu (2019)
Human Rights & Peace & Justice (Syllabus), 2019
This course will introduce politics and practices of human rights as they relate to issues of peace and justice. The language of human-rights has been adapted by diverse actors, such as activists, politicians, policy makers, scholars, and humanitarians in their battle against the different manifestations of state and non-state violence, and in their efforts to seek justice and peace. What does it mean to have ‘human rights’? Through what legal, political and moral references are certain abuses framed as human rights and pursued as rights-claims? What are the limits and possibilities of human rights advocacy in securing peace and justice? The first part of the course familiarizes students with the broad international and historical context that made human rights concepts and practices possible. We will particularly look at how these practices have traveled across different locales, especially in the aftermath of World War II and in the Post-Cold War projects of so-called transition from authoritarianism to democratic governance, accompanied by the renewed emergence of identity politics and NGOs. We will pay attention to how gender, race, class, culture and geopolitics interact in both defining rights and addressing violations. As we explore these emerging cultures of rights, we will also question issues of cultural relativism vs. universalism, collective rights vs. individual rights, and right to culture and nature. Based on this foundation, the second part of the course takes human rights as both a legal and political practice, and explores approaches to, and models of, justice and accountability that have been pursued to address political violence and bolster peace. We will examine the major frameworks of international human rights law, and various efforts to peace-building and reconciliation, such as international criminal tribunals, truth commissions, traditional or alternative justice mechanisms. The third, and final, part of the course explores how human rights has become basis for humanitarian and military intervention as well as a site of struggle for non-governmental organizations, journalists, academics, doctors, lawyers – people who claim to seek peace and justice without borders. We will both look at these diverse actors’ practices of documenting human rights violations (from humanitarian work to forensic projects) and the kinds of moral claims (benevolent care, distant spectatorship, universal suffering) embedded in such interventions. This course is open to advanced undergraduate students. The participants are not expected to have any background familiarity with the issues that will be covered during the course.